NYC Tech Meetup

I was fortunate enough to attend the NY Tech Meetup last night at NYU while I was in town.

Interesting to see the startup energy in NY compared with Silicon Valley.

Anyways I got to see some cool startups and tech businesses:
  • UberCab - The on-demand car service opens up shop in NYC. Probably not a service I'd use a lot, but I like they way the intelligently used IPhone and Mapping to solve a real-life problem.
  • Clique - Simple dating site, just within your social circles. The application was nice and simple, and really used social in an intelligent way. Had matchmaking features, and tackled online dating in a very safe way.
  • Rezscore - Ability to upload your resume and have it graded. Provided suggestions on how to make better. Definitely something I could see getting better over time. However it just focused on the traditional resume. Didn't take into consideration the future of the resume.
  • Matchbook - Location bookmarking for places you've been. It displays your bookmarks and the bookmarks of others. I can see value here, with as much as I eat out, look for places to work, and on the hunt for a good beer. Its not always to remember where you've been, that worked for different reasons.
  • Kloudco - Provides a central repository of all your information from email, calendar, docs to social streams. Backs up, organizes, and provides a plain text search. Needed some more user interface work, but looked like an interesting solution for some.
  • Shoutem - Allows you to build iPhone app in browser. Pull RSS feeds, iCal events , location data, and social streams. They want to be Wordpress for iPhone apps. Very ambitious.
  • Bridg.me - Works with your calendar, and enables events to call you. You enter in the conference call info with a Bridg.me link and it calls you, and connects with conference. Uses Google Calendar OAuth, and is built on Twilio. It was also created in 48 hours, as a hack project. Cool stuff.
  • Shelby.tv - Allows you to discover and enjoy videos on web. YouTube, Vimeo, and more. Has search and social features built in. Shelby gets smarter and learns what you like and what you don't like.
  • Urtak - A better way to find out what people think. Its a simple site survey widget to replace commenting. System allows users can ask questions so you get answers to questions you never thought of. It has interesting yes / no quick links that kind of encourages you to keep answering and letting it scroll to see whats next. Dead simple builder and embed tool for deploying.
I would say all these startups are truly working to solve actual problems in everyday life, which I think is important with startups.

There are times when I'm sitting in pitches in Silicon Valley and I don't think people are solve real-life problems. Well real-life problems outside the echo chamber.

It was interesting to see the passion NYC startup energy and mingle with some of the tech folks here.

Look forward to coming out more often and attending future NY Tech Meetups.